Date: Feb 04, 2008
People: Craig Counterman, Mike Moretti, Qing Dong
Purpose: Qing wants to understand Stellar data model and also wants to present the thalia data model and permission model to Stellar to see if there is anything in common
1. thalia data model
2. thalia permission model
3. Talked about Alfresco's support for group management. Alfresco's web services api doesn't support it. We should be able to use group management by using custom actions or web scripts. However, Qing has never done any work with Alfresco groups. Will need to write some sample code to make sure it works. Craig is not sure if we want to use Alfresco to manage permission/user/group. He is worried that Alfresco's permission and authority management might not be flexible enough for thalia usage. Qing and Mike both feel that since Alfresco provide the management of permission and user/group, we should try to use it. We need to decide if the scope for the first phase of ECM should include permission/user/group management or not.
We also talked about how to import groups from moira to alfresco. The most obvious way is to use ldap. However, we don't know if we can import groups whose memebership is hidden and also if alfresco provide ways to enforce moira's group attributes such as private vs. public, hidden vs. non-hidden, etc.
Also sometimes Stellar's permission are time sensitive. For example a user might only be allow to view a document during a certain period. We don't know if Alfresco supports that. Qing thinks not, but we might be able to use a rule to remove the permission after the period expires.
4. Mike gave Qing some introduction on Stellar's data model. Stellar has four objects: Nexus (A hierarchical structure. courses and sections are organized into nexus), Arc (A hierarchical structure. can have Arc or content as children. Used for certain areas inside the course, such as homework, events, etc), Content (can have content or atom as children. Children have user-defined ordering. Content contains metadata), Atom (url or file object).
5. We also talked about grade book. It doesn't seem to fit in the scope of the REST api. Craig doesn't feel that the ECM is the place to store the grade book info.